Accessibility is not a side project. Designing for accessibility is what determines whether a product works at all for a large group of people. About 1.3 billion people globally, roughly 16% of the world’s population, live with some form of disability. Thus, designing for accessibility is not edge case.
You’ll quickly become aware of this reality once you start shipping products. The moment someone can’t complete a form, navigate a menu, or read your content, the need for accessibility stops being theoretical.
Plus, the need for accessible design is not just about serving those with permanent disabilities. You can identify use cases that require accessible design from the ways people actually use a product. For example, people might watch videos without sound because they’re in public or try to tap through a workflow with one hand because they’re trying to get something done quickly. Captions are a simple example. Most people who use them aren’t deaf. They just don’t want to miss what’s being said. These are the gaps.
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Accessibility often gets framed as a compliance issue. But this article looks at accessibility from the perspective you must actually deal with: what accessibility standards mean in practice, where things usually break, and how teams fix accessibility issues without slowing everything down.
Understanding Accessibility Standards
Accessibility standards exist so teams don’t have to guess what people need. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, which are depicted in Figure 1, are the ones we keep coming back to. They give us a shared baseline, ensuring usability across different conditions.
What matters in our day-to-day design work is that most teams aim for Level AA accessibility, which is the accepted standard for most online services and the legal standard that the US Department of Justice enforces for ADA compliance. Not because it’s perfect but because it’s realistic and covers the majority of real issues.
The pressure to achieve these standards is increasing. The legal side of accessibility isn’t abstract. Product teams are increasingly placing accessibility failures in the same category as other cases of user harm.
Whether an inaccessible design affects healthcare access, benefit applications, or access to family-law information and legal services online, the expectation is the same: systems should not create avoidable barriers that impact people’s ability to use essential services. The existence of such barriers is usually expensive.
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Key Components of Accessible Design
Accessibility isn’t a checklist that you can run through at the end of a project. It’s the outcome of all the decisions you make while designing and building a product.
Text Alternatives
The creation of alt text gets treated like a formality, but it’s not. Bad alt text creates noise. Good alt text actually helps people understand what’s happening. It also boosts search-engine optimization (SEO), as shown in Figure 2.
Sometimes the right move is no alt text. You can just indicate that an image is merely decorative and move on. Captions and transcripts matter for the same reason. Not just for compliance. For clarity. For effective search. For scanning. Users notice the difference immediately when the alt text is missing.
User-Interface Considerations
If a product doesn’t work using a keyboard, it’s broken. We see such issues all the time with custom components. They look polished and work fine with a mouse but, the moment the user tries to move through a user interface (UI) using only the keyboard, things fall apart—elements get skipped, controls don’t respond, and workflows just stop. Figure 3 shows an example.
Figure 3—Users need to navigate using keyboard shortcuts
Focus states are another part of the same problem. Teams sometimes remove them because they don’t look clean. But their outline is the only thing showing where users are as they move through a page without a mouse. Take that away and users must guess what’s active.
Visual and Auditory Elements
Contrast issues are still everywhere. The WebAIM Million report has repeatedly shown the same thing: low contrast is one of the most common failures across Web sites, as shown in Figure 4.
These errors are rarely intentional. They just slip through. If you test a UI design in bright sunlight or on a slightly older screen, suddenly it doesn’t hold up. This issue shows up even more in product-customization flows. When someone is trying to design T-shirts or preview hoodies, low contrast, unclear controls, or poor scaling immediately slow them down. These are the moments where accessibility stops being theoretical and directly affects whether someone can successfully complete a task.
Text scaling is another issue that teams often underestimate. If a page layout breaks at 200% zoom, it wasn’t robust to begin with. Motion settings can also be problematic. Some users disable motion for a reason. Respect that.
Semantics and Structure
When we do Semantic HTML right, screen readers don’t need help. Navigation is predictable. Where things start going wrong is when everything gets built as custom components. That’s where ARIA comes in. WAI-ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) lets you restore the missing meaning with roles, labels, and states, as Figure 5 shows. You can tell a screen reader, “This is a button,” “this is expanded,” or “this is a menu.
But using ARIA is not a clean fix. Product teams must take responsibility for recreating all the behavior the browser would have handled for free. That’s why overusing ARIA becomes a problem. Teams end up layering fixes on top of custom components, trying to simulate what native elements already do better.
Use ARIA when you need it—for complex widgets or edge cases. But if you’re adding role="button" to something that could have just been a button, you’ve already made your life harder.
Error Prevention and Assistance
Web forms like that shown in Figure 6 are where most accessibility issues show up. Vague errors. No indication of what went wrong. Focus jumping unpredictably.
Good forms guide people. Bad ones make them continually retry. Be sure to tie errors to fields. Summarize them clearly. Let users recover without starting over. Small changes can have an outsized impact.
Touch and Mobility
Mobile interactions expose weak design fast. Tiny tap targets. Drag-only interactions. Controls that require precision. Even neglecting the thumb positions that are shown in Figure 7 can cause problems.
WCAG 2.2 defines clearer requirements for thumb position. But even without reading the specifications, you’ll know when something feels off. If someone needs multiple attempts to tap something, it’s broken.
Tools and Techniques for Implementing Accessibility
You don’t need to guess where the problems are. Automated tools can help. Axe, WAVE, and Lighthouse can quickly catch obvious issues such as missing labels, contrast failures, and structural problems. But they don’t catch everything.
You need to test with actual assistive technologies such as Non-Visual Desktop Access (NVDA), VoiceOver, and TalkBack. This is where things get real—things like the following:
buttons that technically exist but don’t announce themselves properly
links that make no sense out of context
workflows that trap users with no exit
These issues are not visible in automated reports.
Implementing CI/CD integration—Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), and Continuous Deployment (CD)—helps keep things from regressing. Tools such as jest-axe or pa11y make such integrations part of your pipeline rather than requiring one-off audits.
Rely on usability testing. You’ll learn more from one session with a real assistive-technology user than from hours of internal reviews.
Challenges and Solutions in Accessibility Implementation
Every product team encounters the same problems.
Outdated Code
Legacy code is a big problem. You’ll find issues such as the following:
But you don’t have to fix everything at once. Start with high-traffic areas and shared components. That’s where the greatest leverage is. A lot of the difficulty isn’t just about fixing the user interface; it’s about figuring out what has changed and why. Design decisions get buried across support tickets, specifications, and approvals.
Product teams that handle updating code better usually have a clearer system for tracking changes, similar to how contract-management software keeps everything tied to a single source instead of scattered across tools.
Mismatched Skills
Skills gaps show up, too. Designers might be unsure about patterns; engineers about how to test. Fixing these issues relies on the use of brief, repeatable practices; quick product demos, and shared patterns. Rotate responsibility by letting more people get hands-on.
Accessibility Debt
Third-party components are another friction point, as Figure 9 shows.
Figure 9—The relationship between accessibility debt and delivery debt
Some components are accessible. Many aren’t. You must either audit them early or pay for it later.
Delayed Prioritization
Prioritization is a key issue. Accessibility often gets pushed—again and again—until something breaks, people complain, or legal risks show up. The product teams that handle this well don’t treat accessibility as optional. They build accessibility into design reviews and their definitions of done.
Future Trends in Accessibility and Inclusive Design
Nevertheless, some things are improving, as Figure 10 shows.
Figure 10—Universal design, accessibility, and inclusive design
AI-generated captions and alt text are improvements and save time, but they often still miss context and need review and revision before they’re usable.
Users now expect personalization such as reduced motion, dark mode, and high contrast. If a product ignores system settings, it immediately feels off. Such personalization is especially important for digital services, including healthcare platforms, for which usability and accessibility directly affect user engagement.
WCAG 2.2 and tightening regulations are raising the baseline, especially for focus, target size, and interaction patterns. These matter more for products that ship across markets.
More product teams are moving away from fully custom builds because most accessibility issues come from components that weren’t designed with semantics and behavior in mind.
Where to Go from Here
Don’t start by trying to handle everything at once. Choose one key workflow, then expand from there. Fix what’s obviously broken. For example:
David is a technology lawyer who has extensive experience in artificial intelligence (AI), financial technology, human-rights law, and digital marketing. Read More
